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Let's keep our fingers crossed for 2014

Nothing can prepare us for the 'unknown unknowns'

Gay activists take part in a protest event called "March against Hatred" in St. Petersburg, Russia, in November. Judith Timson says 2014 is a good time to focus on the dozens of countries that threaten the life and security of the LGBT communy. (ALEXANDER DEMIANCHUK / REUTERS)

I’ve never enjoyed going to fortune tellers. I’m a control freak and that extends to my own destiny. Who needs to know in advance how bad it’s going to get? As for the good stuff, I like to be pleasantly surprised.

My only fun time with fortune telling occurred when I dressed up and played one, for a bunch of little kids, including my own, in a snowed-in ski chalet on New Year’s Eve. It was around the time that Baghdad was seeping into everyone’s geopolitical consciousness, and one confused little boy, mashing up the news, thought I should be called “Madame Hussein.”

Madame H told all the kids they were going to have a spectacular year, so long as they occasionally listened to their parents, and did their homework.

I wish I could be so helpful about 2014. We all know that no amount of homework will prepare us for what former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so famously called “the unknown unknowns.”

We’re talking disasters we never see coming — like the Lac Mégantic runaway train explosion that left 47 people dead. We’re talking leaders now in power who will fall spectacularly on their swords or plunge them deep into their opponents. We’re talking financial gurus and bankers who will swear everything is hunky dory until they close their office doors and start sobbing.

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No, best not to know what shocking events we will have to cope with. We should always carry our handy alert citizen’s first aid kit — resilience, compassion for others, healthy skepticism, the ability to be optimistic in spite of the doomsayers.

We should probably, in terms of the economy, take every financial deity’s advice and build on our personal savings.

And in light of how suddenly unempowered many of us were in the wake of the surprisingly protracted power outage following the ice storm, an old-fashioned corded phone, a box of candles, the matches to light them, and a humble sense of how many others in the rest of the world live daily might come in handy as well. As for the storm itself, as political writer Mark Halperin succinctly put it: “Everybody tweets about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.”

Other than that, we should get ready to talk about the following this year:

1. Toronto’s next mayor. Serious challengers to our famously infamous chief magistrate will be stepping forward, hoping against hope that the dire threats from the bobbleheads high atop F-Nation to make it a “bloodbath” will dissipate in strategic, well-waged campaigns to give our remarkable city the leadership it deserves.

2. Gay rights versus international institutionalized homophobia. Let’s not worry about who attends a local Pride parade. Let’s talk about the 70-plus countries — Russia, Uganda, and many other African nations — whose laws pose a serious threat to the life and security of the LGBT community. The Sochi Olympics will be the first games in which LGBT rights are a dominant political issue. The spotlight should be, as it always is, on the athletes and their feats. But progressive leaders everywhere have figured out ways to make a human rights statement, including sending gay official representatives to the games. Just as women’s rights became about human rights, so too should the rights of the worldwide LGBT community be framed as a pressing human rights issue.

3. Hillary Clinton versus the slowly building, somewhat whimsical support for her possible opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination — senior Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Hey, it’s Hillary’s turn to make history as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 and first woman president. Isn’t it?

Her deftly unofficial official campaign will begin this year. But wait. Warren, a former Harvard law professor, is a YouTube darling, because of her fearless ability to take on the financial elites, to invoke compassion for the little guy, and to sound elegant, authentic and most of all, admirably direct as she does it. As a speaker, she blows her colleagues out of the water. Of course Obama did that too, and even his most ardent supporters are now wondering where his passion went. This discussion might widen to include the relative value of words versus actions.

4. Canadian political mud wrestling: the past versus the future. Will Stephen Harper prevail over Jason Kenney’s attempts to portray himself as the Conservative future? Will Justin Trudeau’s charm and ability to connect with voters smack down NDP Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair’s harder headed but impressively honed strategic thinking? Will anyone in this country other than the political elites and paid chatterers give a damn?

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